Re: ZPD Caveat

vera p john-steiner (vygotsky who-is-at unm.edu)
Sun, 12 Oct 1997 00:09:05 -0600 (MDT)

Friends,
I read the last few messages on zpd after sundown, in the evening
following the Jewish high holiday of Yom Kippur. It is the only
religious holiday I observe. It is my day of remembering family
members who were killed during the Holocaust, or died later because of
injuries, physical or psychic, due to that experience. I search each
year for ways to connect, to co-experience somehow that legacy. It is
difficult.
Last night I happen to have read Cynthia Ozick's piece in the New Yorker
about Anne Frank. She takes on Otto Frank, her father who survived, she
labels him
"an accomodationist."
She represents Otto Frank's desire to include others who have been
persecuted as an example of that accomodationist position.. She has no
understanding of the deep longing some of us have, after experiencing
the Holocaust to rejoin humanity, to be connected. After all, the Nazi
plan was to exile us from being human, from belonging . At the same time,
the vividness with which she retells Anne Frank's last days is haunting.

Her piece was a negative zpd for me, it pained me, it
made me angry. I felt punished in some way for my own steady
efforts to re-affirm life, while also trying to confront what I
knew of mechanized genocide. Why did I care about Cynthia Ozick's
diatribe? Because it added to my sense of the difficulty of
bridging the gap of otherness, of caring his/herstory from
another continent, to have an authentic voice in an arena
where political attacks, media events silence me in yet another way. So
I needed to speak.

This message was cut off, unknowingly, by a person who shares my phone,e-
mail line. It added to my questions of whether this was an appropriate
place/time to express my still very raw Yom Kippur ruminations.
Zpd is, among other things, about "experts." In this case, this self-
appointed, very public expert violated my day of silence, of grief, of
honoring in quiet thought my most courageous mother, and so many others,
because she presumed to tell me about how we should remember and honor
Anne Frank, and thus all victims of the Holocaust.
Thanks for listening,
Vera

---------------- Vera P. John-Steiner
Department of Linguistics Humanities Bldg. 526
University of New Mexico
Albuquerque, NM 87131
(505) 277-6353 or 277-4324
Internet: vygotsky who-is-at unm.edu
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